PJNet

The Christian Science Monitor announced today that it is going to shut down the paper edition in April 2009 and just publish online. With a paper that does fairly pure high quality journalism that might sound like an experiment worth watching. However,  a trip to the Monitor’s website might diminish the worth of that experiment. It is fairly static.

It reminds me of MinnPost.com, the now almost one-year old online journalism experiment run by Joel Kramer. He believes high quality journalism is enough.  I am a high quality journalism advocate, but just putting news stories up without any interactivity, without any pizazz to pump up the best of the stories, is not going to be enough.  Also I don’t think just throwing an electronic newspaper on the online doorstop will sell.

For success mix print, video, audio, interactivity and community building. The Christian Science Monitor has a chance to build that community because it has a worthy brand and Kramer might build one too because he has connections, but just throwing that electronic newspapers on the online doorstep is not enough.

OJR has a good interview with Kramer today. All those who think hyperlocal is the Holy Grail had best read this from Kramer:

Before we started I thought we’d do everything local. My reasoning for that is that when you’re on the Web, you’re just one click away from national sites that have a lot of resources so why duplicate? But even before we started we did some focus groups with interested readers, and in those focus groups people said to us, ‘If you want a site that we’re going to identify with, as being the site for Minnesotans to come to who are serious about news, don’t make it provincial. We have broad interests.’ So even before we launched we heard quite a bit of that. So even before the launch we decided to do some national work. I can tell you after 11 months of watching what people read, we’ve learned that in fact, doing those national stories increases traffic because of the way the Web works.

We’ve had some very good, solid local stories that have gotten 5,000 readers or more. But others not so much. Our goal is to do serious, high-quality journalism for people who care about Minnesota. That’s our public purpose. But we’re dealing in a medium where you often get traffic from strange things.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 11:35 pm and is filed under Joel Kramer, Journalism, Journalism Business Models, Newspapers, Reinventing Journalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.